Yeah, there's been a realignment, but it's as garbage as the previous alignment

 We're starting to see the broad outlines of a second Very Stable Genius administration come into focus, and it indicates, as expected, an incoherent populist-nationalist mess where the few sound, conservative policies get sullied by having been folded into the overall cluster-you-know-what.

Henry Olsen is kind of an odd cat. He's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a fine house in Washington, and he's capable of articulating the conservative vision as applied to specific areas, but he, for some reason, seems to have a soft spot for Trump. 

The latest example is his current New York Post column, in which he asserts that Trump's November victory signals an historic American political realignment, which is probably true, but doesn't follow up with much in the way of signals as to whether he thinks it's a healthy one:

Signs suggest it could be something even worse: a historic defeat that puts Republicans in the political driver’s seat for a generation or more.

That’s because the exit poll showed that more voters said they were Republican than Democrat — for the first time in a presidential election since 1928.

Such a result hasn’t happened since talking pictures were new and Babe Ruth clobbered homers in the original Yankee Stadium.

No one alive today has ever voted in a presidential race where this has occurred.

Now, watch how he words this part.:

A world where Republicans lead Democrats by 8 to 10 points in partisan preference is one where Republican preferences and priorities prevail.

Like the GOP in the last century, Democrats could win only by running as “me too” candidates, offering a slightly less bold version of the Republican agenda.

Well, okay, but those preferences and priorities are, as I say, populism-nationalism with the occasionally actual conservative position showing up like a blob of flour in a lumpy gravy. 

Olsen does qualify his wowee-zowee level of amazement with this:

This isn’t set in stone, though: Trump needs to have a successful term.

If the economy tanks, or illegal migration continues, or Trump goes to war with China or Russia, voters will flee from the GOP like rats off a sinking ship.

Trump could also mess up by prioritizing issues he didn’t run on.

George W. Bush did that in 2005, when he tried to reform Social Security without first getting a mandate to do so.

Barack Obama, too, in 2009 and 2010, when he made passing Obamacare his focus even after running as a centrist.

Trump could make either or both mistakes. Failure and fecklessness will be punished.

But imagine if he doesn’t.

Imagine an America in 2028 that’s at peace, with illegal immigration virtually ended, the woke tsunami broken and the economy humming.

Henry, the signs during this transition period don't point in the direction of the scenario you want us to consider.

At a time when the very notion of the West is extremely wobbly (the financial woes of Britain and France, the Orban camp within NATO, Turkey's clear shift to an anti-Israel stance, the ongoing inadequate trickle of what Ukraine needs to defeat Russia, the cultural rot and population decline common to Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic), he's getting his kicks with kidding-on-the-square comments, as well as outright threats, to the United States' allies and neighbors:  

Trump on Wednesday continued to tease US territorial expansion in social media posts, criticizing the operation of the canal and doubling down on suggestions the US should absorb Canada and Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark.

In a sardonic Christmas message, Trump claimed Chinese soldiers are operating the Panama Canal and reiterated his criticism that Panama is exploiting US vessels that use the waterway.

“Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything,’” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.

In the same message, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor,” again insinuating Canada should become a US state. He also suggested the citizens of Greenland “want the US to be there, and we will.”

Recall that he also got off on a contentious footing with Mexico's new president Claudia Sheinbaum, suggesting US forces may have to enter Mexico to deal with the cartel problem.

Then there are the tariffs, about which a National Retail Federation report released last month had this to say:

• The proposed tariffs on the six product categories alone would reduce American consumers’ spending power by $46 billion to $78 billion every year the tariffs are in place.

• The proposed tariffs would have a significant and detrimental impact on the costs of a wide range of consumer products sold in the United States, particularly on products where China is the major supplier.

• The increased costs as a result of the proposed tariffs would be too large for U.S. retailers to absorb and would result in prices higher than many consumers would be willing or able to pay.

• Consumers would pay $13.9 billion to $24 billion more for apparel; $8.8 billion to $14.2 billion more for toys; $8.5 billion to $13.1 billion more for furniture; $6.4 billion to $10.9 billion more for household appliances; $6.4 billion to $10.7 billion more for footwear, and $2.2 billion to $3.9 billion more for travel goods.

• Based on current trade, average tariff rates for all categories examined would exceed 50% in the extreme tariff scenario, up in most cases from single or low double digits.

Then there is - yeah, I'm gonna go there - the appearance that the VSG is instinctively drawn to associates and appointees whose sex lives and marital track records are as sordid as his. Musk, Hegseth, Kennedy. Matt Gaetz, who is no longer in the running for Attorney General, nor even a House member, but to whose defense the VSG came a couple of days ago, calling the exhaustive ethics report "unfair."

Henry, character is not a part of the Trumpist vision that now pervades the Republican Party.

Then there is the hawking of a perfume line and the Lee Greenwood Bible during this transition period. 

Donald Trump thinks this whole thing is a hoot. He's never experienced more glorification, which is the end aim of anything he does in life.

Henry, I honestly don't get your wow-this-is-exciting assessment of this new Republican alignment. It's not going to achieve your dream scenario, and any table scraps of conservatism to be found in it are hopeless tainted by the surrounding garbage.

"New political era." Big effing whoop. We're still headed toward the same accelerated decline the Left had us on. 

 

 

 

 

 

Liz's decision

 I'd been wondering if she'd go the binary-choice route:

Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she said during remarks at Duke University, according to audio obtained by CNN.

The former Wyoming congresswoman noted the importance of voting for Harris in states like North Carolina, where she appeared on Wednesday.

“I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I just said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Cheney said.

She made the announcement in North Carolina specifically because it is a battleground state, according to a source close to Cheney.

“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she continued.

She joins her fellow Republican member of the J6 committee Adam Kinzinger in opting for this means of opposing the Very Stable Genius. They have considerable company. Over 200 staffers for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney have endorsed Harris.

I 've been rethinking my harsh view of at least some of the people who have decided thusly. Cheney and Kinzinger are serious people with solid conservative bona fides, and I have no disagreement with their assessment of Trump and Trumpism. Cheney has chosen the word "danger" wisely.

But as I said recently over at Precipice, I have to conclude differently:

I’m not sure that stressing which is worse, which requires establishing some kind of criteria for how to line the two candidates up side by side to determine that, is a productive use of our time as summer turns to fall in 2024. The Very Stable Genius is a solipsistic man-child driven solely by self-glorification, but Kamala Harris has no redeeming qualities, as a politician, statesperson, or an example of character.

I mean that. John Kelly was exactly right last October when he said that Trump has no idea what America stands for. That goes for Harris as well.  From her abysmal economic policy stances (increase in corporate and capital gains taxes, price controls, minimum wage increase) to her zeal for having government impose play-like energy forms on the post-American people to her horrible choice of a running mate to her apparent inability to see that for a ceasefire to be agreed to in Gaza, Hamas would have to come to the table and negotiate, she is a nightmare.

The likelihood that Republicans could take the Senate could mitigate her ability to do damage. But consider the symbolism-level power a US president has. No one else serves as a national emblem the way a president does. 

Presidents have cultural influence. Her people are big on talking about vibes, so consider what kinds of vibes she'd emit from the White House.

It's pretty apparent that one of our most dire cultural dilemmas is the diminishing centrality of the nuclear family headed by a mother and father. Such a family unit is where we first learn about loyalty, trust, teamwork, humor, balance, encouragement, boundaries, and a host of other human essentials. Growing up in such an environment, we get to see a model of a man and woman relating to each other with affection and respect.

Kamala Harris thinks this is at best a boutique arrangement, one of many in which people can thrive. Why wouldn't she? Her leftist parents met at Berkeley in the 1960s, stayed together long enough to have two daughters and then split up. Her mother then emphasized the primacy of the "strong, black woman" role in approaching life while raising her daughters, setting the path for Harris's identity politics focus - and defense of abortion. Alas, at age 29, she had an affair with the married Willie Brown, and that's how she began her political career. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, lost his first wife because he impregnated the couple's nanny. 

In short, she doesn't have a lot of personal experience with stable two-parent (as in father and mother) families. She would no doubt advocate on the world stage for inclusion of all manner of exotic arrangements by which children are raised. 

I am not alone in my insistence that not voting for either Trump or Harris is the best choice for conservatives. Meghan McCain pretty much speaks for me on the matter:

“I greatly respect the wide variety of political opinions of all of my family members and love them all very much,” Meghan McCain wrote Tuesday on the social platform X. “I, however, remain a proud member of the Republican Party and hope for brighter days ahead. (Not voting for Harris or Trump, hope that clears things up).”

She did not touch upon who else, if anyone, she might support for the White House.

Responding to calls last month to endorse Harris’s ticket, McCain said, “Please stop trying to turn me into a progressive.”

“It’s a fever dream,” she added “I’m a life long, generational conservative.”

My fellow contributors at The Freemen News-letter also generally inhabit the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. It's the subject of much discussion in social media threads.

I am well aware that either Trump or Harris will win the election in November. I can't, with my meager resources, persuade a critical mass of voters to stay home.

But I come back to this: I will not have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of national ruin.

No filter between that brain and that mouth - today's edition

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No filter between that brain and that mouth

 The Very Stable Genius has always had this problem, but it seems to be getting more acute of late.

He tries for a little Borscht Belt humor at a moment when solemnity was called for:

Near the start of his speech at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, Donald Trump spoke about Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the shooting at the former president’s campaign rally last month. 

Trump held a moment of silence for Comperatore, whom he called "a hero to all of us." Yet even as he honored the late firefighter, Trump appeared to make an off-the-cuff quip while talking about his widow’s grief.

The GOP presidential nominee told the crowd that a friend of his had given Comperatore's family a $1 million check, and he also made reference to money donated to the family's GoFundMe. 

"But you know what? Corey's wife said, 'I'd rather have my husband,'” Trump said.

“Isn’t that good? I know a lot of wives that would not say that — I’m sorry," he continued, as the crowd laughed. "They would not say that."

He makes a ha-ha for the drool-besotted minions at the expense of a Senate candidate's physical appearance:

“I don’t speak badly about somebody’s physical disability,” Trump spewed this go-round, referring to Montana’s senior Democratic senator [Jon Tester] who is up again for reelection.

“But he’s got the biggest stomach I have ever seen. I swear, I swear. That’s the biggest stomach – I have never seen a stomach like that!”

Again, it wasn’t the most pathetic moment.

“Stomach brimming out like a big slob!” Trump further mocked, until introducing on stage the disgraced former military White House physician-turned-Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson, who immediately likened Tester, who controls the Pentagon’s purse strings, to a “hippopotamus.”

He really gets unhinged over Josh Shapiro, a centrist governor, and gets pretty damn grandiose about his legacy regarding Israel:

The former president took aim at the Pennsylvania Democrat on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, after Shapiro delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Trump said: "The highly overrated Jewish Governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, made a really bad and poorly delivered speech talking about freedom and fighting for Comrade Kamala Harris for President, yet she hates Israel and will do nothing but make its journey through the complexities of survival as difficult as possible, hoping in the end that it will fail.

"Judge only by her actions!"

Trump added: "Yet Shapiro, for strictly political reasons, refused to acknowledge that I am the best friend that Israel, and the Jewish people, ever had. I have done more for Israel than any President, and frankly, I have done more for Israel than any person, and it's not even close.

"Shapiro has done nothing for Israel, and never will. Comrade Kamala Harris, the Radical Left Marxist who stole the nomination from Crooked Joe, will do even less. Israel is in BIG trouble!" 

Got that? Any other person. Moses. David. Theodor Herzl. Gold Meir. All second-raters in the VSG's estimation. 

But this one is the most disturbing. He's basically saying that anybody who chooses to stand in the way of his ambitions is properly an object of hate:

DONALD TRUMP HAS NO PLANS TO HEED the advice of his aides and limit himself to policy contrasts when he debates Kamala Harris. He wants to make it personal.

“This is just the way I am. I hate my opponent. I hate my opponents,” Trump told a confidant who advised the former president to consider backing away from calling the vice president “stupid” or “dumb” at their high-profile standoff in a few weeks, which he has done repeatedly.

Trump explained to the confidant that he’s treating Harris the same way he did Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. “Hillary, Joe, Kamala. It doesn’t matter. I just hate them.”

To another adviser, Trump was blunt about taking on Harris: “I’m going to be mean.”

Any spokesperson for any Christian denomination, organization or publication who dares to attempt justifying this instantly forfeits all credibility.

 This is an eight-year-old in a septuagenarian's body. He is unfit for any role in public life, let alone the presidency.

Stay home in November, post-America. 

 

 

 

Charlie Sykes and the mirror opposite of the Flight-93-election argument

 You may recall the article that instilled a sense of urgency in a number of right-leaners two presidential election cycles ago:

In September 2016, Michael Anton wrote an essay for the right-wing Claremont Institute, “The Flight 93 Election,” making the case for Donald Trump’s election as a necessary gamble to stave off the destruction of conservatism. Anton then did a stint in Trump’s National Security Council, and last night was rewarded by the president with a posting to the National Board for Education Sciences. It was a fitting coda for Trump to single out the figure who most perfectly captured the spirit that right-wing intellectuals brought to the era.

Anton’s case was notable, first, for its novelty. Before Trump won, “Never Trumpers” constituted the dominant strain of right-wing intellectual sentiment. Here was a prestigious organ of the intellectual right making a positive case for a nominee that the movement had dismissed as a clown and a surefire loser. Anton memorably seized the imagination of his audience by likening the choice to that faced by the passengers of Flight 93, who wrested control of the plane from Al Qaeda hijackers on 9/11. Allowing Hillary Clinton to win would mean certain death for conservatism, whereas electing Trump was risky — “you may die anyway” — but clearly preferable to certain death.

Anton’s argument was filled with dramatic rhetorical flourishes like this, and what little of it that was not non-falsifiable was demonstrably false. (According to Anton, “liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s,” Democrats “treat open borders as the ‘absolute value,’” and Barack Obama engaged in “flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents.”)

Despite (or perhaps because of) these flaws, Anton articulated the bedrock principle that has driven the right the last [eight] years: The Democratic Party is so terrifying and all-powerful that literally any measures, however unwise, are justifiable to block them from winning an election. That is the power of Anton’s chosen analogy, which urges his audience to overlook all of Trump’s complete unfitness to handle the job (“You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” he concedes) on the grounds that the alternative means imminent national death. 

Now, in summer 2024, former radio host and Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes has employed the same quickening-of-the-senses tactic, but from the opposite end of the spectrum:

 My latest in The Atlantic:

When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

There's nothing bizarre about that characterization, Charlie. She's on the record as, prior to this week's flip-flops, supporting the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a path to citizenship for pretty much anybody coming over the border, pretty much unrestricted abortion, creating of a federal Office of Paid Family Leave, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which conferred legitimacy on Iran's toxic regime.

He enlists the help of fellow Atlantic writer Tom Nichols in his disingenuous attempt to paint Never-Trumpers as looking for an excuse to vote for the Very Stable Genius:

It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Theissen leans on this sort of crude caricature because it’s useful for anti-anti-Trump Republicans who have been scrabbling desperately for an excuse — almost any excuse — to vote for Trump. For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Trump, whatever his crimes or his frauds, the other side is always worse. As Damon Linker once wrote, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”

But the gravamen of Thiessen’s argument was that Harris also posed an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives. 

“Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated,” he claimed.

But, as it turns out, the choice of Trump vs. Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy choice for Never Trumpers, who have moved far beyond searching for a “benign alternative.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols posted a quick answer to Thiessen: “Yes, I have to pick between a normal person who is going to have some policies I won’t like and an unhinged, deranged wannabe dictator sociopath surrounded by goons.”

In other words, not really that hard at all.

On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.

Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”

The trauma of the last month also made the choice somewhat easier. 

Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. 

Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. 

For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.

There are, however, still bumps ahead, and not every Never Trumper will be able to reconcile themselves to Harris’s style of progressivism.

That would be me.

But according to Sykes, this makes me a poseur, wishing to appear aloof:

Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance.

Irrelevance. Interesting framing. Just what sets the standard for relevance? A seat at the table for the food fight over which presidential candidate and political party will achieve the victory of clinging to power by its fingernails while being pelted with investigations, lawsuits and inevitably disillusioned purists of either stripe? Count me out. I'm interested in something with some lasting power, the immutable stuff.

I realize that identity and power are a lot sexier to the 2024 post-Westerner than the quest for truth, justice, beauty and wisdom. But that's what is. I'm interested in what should be. And I'm so damn interested in it that I can't abide by what Kamala Harris is about any more than I can what the VSG is about.

So, yeah, I still plan to stay home in November. For a reason I've laid out here before: I don't want to have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of American ruination. 

It is the right thing to do to stand on this narrow sliver of terrain. 

Charlie, why are you so eager to write us off? Do you maybe harbor occasional thoughts that ours is the honorable stance?

Stay home in November - today's edition

 The immediately preceding post here at LITD got into the fissures that suggest a bipartisan package deal combining border measures and Ukraine aid is in peril, with a focus on Mitch McConnell's cowardice and cynicism. 

The matter continues to get more pathetic, with a group of ate-up yay-hoos  organizing a trucker convoy to travel to three points along the border to make a statement about the "globalists" and proclaim that God takes an unambiguous stand on the issue. 

The cynicism now clearly extends to the top of the not-so-grand old party, with the Very Stable Genius asking anyone concerned with a stall in a solution to "please blame it on me." His thinking is that such blame launches a narrative in which he alone can come up with the golden remedy, just like the way he'd end the Ukraine-Russia conflict in 24 hours.

States are now squaring off against the federal government over the matter. 

It's not as if the Biden administration deserves any cutting of slack. It has handled the illegal immigration issue abysmally, and even Democrat big-city mayors are insisting that the administration get serious, so that immigrants quit arriving on buses and finding miserable circumstances. There are also the human trafficking and fentanyl elements. Probably a terrorism element as well, which may fully present itself in ways we don't want to imagine.

A lot of Democratic fecklessness stems from the fact that the always-automatically-ascribe-unassailable-virtue-to-those-from-the-global-south wing drives everything about that party's policy orientation. Perhaps the best-crystallized display of the self-congratulation behind this bias is the moment when AOC put on a crying jag at the border fence.

I have always thought it was ill-advised to package a major domestic issue (the border) with a pressing foreign-policy concern (Ukraine), but Capitol Hill dynamics often result in awkward legislative bundles.

Republican wack jobs like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Matt Gaetz have made Ukraine aid a matter of "principle," calling that West-friendly country's desperate attempt to roll back the brazen aggression inflicted on it by its neighbor a waste of taxpayer dollars. Those in that camp often cite the corruption problems Ukraine has dealt with since its 1991 independence. Their hope is that those willing to give them  an airing will not look at the big picture: Zelensky's understanding that those he's trying to weed out of his government for skimming money and war materiel are stymying his and the nation's ability to set things aright. They're traitors, in a word.

If it seems like I'm going back and forth between Republican and Democratic transgressions, it's because I want to make it clear that I take no side in this year's election cycle. I don't give a flying diddly who gets elected president or to my city council. 

All I'm standing for is seeing that tried and true fusionist conservatism gets an airing. 

David Corn, a well-credentialed lefty columnist, has a piece today that demonstrates how hard it is for most observers - of his stripe or the Trumpisst stripe - to keep an agenda out of their assessments of the lay of the land.

He accurately paints the picture of who the players are, with a focus on Never Trumpers. But when he takes his scalpel to the distinction between types pf Never Trumpers - Bill Kristol types on th one hand, who are going to vote for Biden because "binary choice," and those who are going to fold and kiss the ring of the Very Stable Genius - he shows his hand.

David, there's another type: me.

I refuse to have any truck with the drool-besotted leg-humpers of my former party. I come from a red state, but one with a reputation for its Republicans generally avoiding the yay-hoo vibe. But that era appears to have ended.  Both major candidates for governor are dead to me. 

But on the other hand, I will never abide by the hatred for human advancement, comfort, convenience and safety that drives the Democratic Party, nor its militant identity politics, nor its penchant for wealth redistribution. 

Furthermore, I will not take the bait and engage in any kind of argument catalyzed by an are-you-saying-that-stuff-is-as-bad-as-trying-to-prevent-a-Constitutional-transfer-of-power type challenge. 

I will not choose between poisons. 

I am staying home for both my state's primary in May and the general election in November, and I will tell you that you should, too.

It's the only moral choice.

This isn't the first time I've spelled out this position, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

But I honestly can't see how anyone who likes to sleep well at night can proceed otherwise.

Mike Lee is dead to me

 So the Utah Senator, for the second time, is endorsing the Very Stable Genius for president. 

It's interesting that he couches it in such a way to make him look savvy enough to acknowledge that at least a significant number of post-Americans - maybe including himself, but not necessarily - have problems with the former occupant of the Oval Office:

“Look, whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you agree with everything he says or not, he is our one opportunity to choose order over chaos and putting America first over America last,” Lee said during an appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle on Friday.

A bit more cautious than the way he went about it in 2020, likening the VSG to Captain Moroni, a figure from the Book of Mormon's elaborate and unverifiable cosmology, who supposedly was the general of one of four tribes that supposedly peopled North America around the time of Christ. (Look, I don't want to get too far into looking sniffingly at American denominations with weird theologies. There are many fine Mormons, Brigham Young is a rightly respected university, I have friends who are happy, stable family people who are Moonies, and a dear, now-departed aunt and uncle of mine were devout Christian Scientists. The point is that Lee chose a brave-commander type as a comparison for Trump. He did later have to walk it back a bit. Although the whole matter of denominations with weird theologies may raise questions about whether there's something in the American character that makes us susceptible to signing onto devotions that run counter to what our better judgements are telling us.)

And it's a far cry from where Lee was coming from in 2016:

“Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump,” Lee (R-Utah) told NewsMaxTV host Steve Malzberg. “We can get into that if you want. We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And, statements like that make them nervous.”

Lee wound up voting for Evan McMullen that year (as did I). 

Lee comes from a family of legal heavy-hitters, and his own clerkships are indicative of a guy with a sound Constitutional grounding. 

But consider the moral deterioration of the "best friend" Lee mentions above. That would be Ted Cruz.

I loved Cruz's determination to roll back the "Affordable" Care Act, although in retrospect I can see that my loathing of this further governmental incursion into health care clouded my ability to see how quixotic Cruz's efforts were. And Cruz's proposal to eliminate the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce and Housing were precisely why I was enthused about him as a possible president. I met him at a campaign stop in an ice cream parlor in Columbus, Indiana days before the fateful May 2016 night when he lost the Indiana primary, sealing the dynamics of that year's race.

But Cruz, like so many with impeccable conservative bona fides (think Rick Perry, who called the VSG a "cancer on conservatism" and went on to be his Energy Secretary), decided to set having been humiliated aside and get on the Squirrel Hair Express. My esteem for him went from admiration to contempt.

But at this late date, what is the excuse, besides the morally evasive "binary choice" argument, for getting behind a candidate who is on record saying "a Massive Fraud [sic] of this type allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution"? Who characterizes his opponent as a "stark raving lunatic . . . who is leading this country to hell"?

I'm going to try to trot out the following exhortation as sparingly as I can in the next ten months, so that it doesn't lose its gravity: I'm staying home the first Tuesday in November, and you should, too.